BUSINESS: What Pop-Up Restaurants Tell Us About the Guest Experience
One of the main ideas we push at The Rail is the guest experience. At the end of the day, your customers matter above all else. Doesn’t matter how great your menu or location is, if guests don’t enjoy being at your restaurant your business is doomed. One sub-category of our industry that really wins at the guest experience is the pop-up restaurant. And it’s little surprise. Pop-ups are there and gone in a flash. They need to grab consumers’ attention and win fast. And they do that with a top-notch guest experience. Here’s why pop-restaurants succeed and what they can tell us about the guest experience.
DID YOU KNOWS…
Salt Bae Wage Theft
Looks like it’s gonna be more than just salt dropping off Salt Bae’s arm. Nusret Gökçe, aka the Salt Bae, settled a wage theft lawsuit that’ll pay four of his servers $230,000 over tipping practices at a Midtown restaurant. The servers allege they were kept in the dark about how much was collected in tips each night and received weekly checks in amounts of $2,000 instead of $2,500. The servers also said that Gökçe has an “authoritarian, dictatorial attitude” and “doesn’t care about local laws.”
2020 Election Security
The Mueller Investigation concluded that Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election was "sweeping and systematic" and "violated U.S. criminal law." Ahead of the 2020 contest, how do Americans feel about election security? A new YouGov poll has found that the public is divided along partisan lines with 75% of Republicans confident the U.S. can defend itself from election interference compared to just 37% of Democrats.
Community Steps In
Waffle House has late hours, and one poor employee of a Birmingham location was the only staff working one night. We’re pretty sure no one is paid enough to play host, server, cook, busser, and manager all at once. Fortunately for the employee, one customer that walked in jumped on duty, asking for an apron and jumping behind the counter to help out in any way he can. Others soon joined. It’s a great community feel good story but also a reminder of making sure your staff schedule is square so there are no “gaps” in shifts.
THE END OF THE INNOCENCE
Why it matters to you: Is there a new age dawning in our industry?
Over the past 10 years, restaurant operators have looked on in sympathetic solidarity to the decline of traditional brick & mortar retail. Unfortunately, we may be seeing a similar shift in our own industry that will surely change our sympathy to empathy. Those operators that inhabit malls have watched their traffic plunge and the buildings they occupy go quiet as the retail paradigm inexorable shifts. Turns out, indie restaurants may be seeing the same affect and to make matters worse, we are expediting it. With the rise of delivery and other off-premise dining options, operators have been scrambling to keep up. Quick implementation of delivery via third-party services has dramatically increased the choices consumers have, but there is an unfortunately corollary impact: They dine out less often.
Off-premise services eat away at check averages by eliminating the extra sales of beverages and preclude upselling by your best trained servers. For retail, the trade was different, but the result almost exactly the same. Think of GrubHub as the UPS of restaurant sales. In order to survive, big retailers have launched initiatives to capture sales online. This happened primarily because they had no choice. With Amazon controlling more than 49% of all retail sales, it was follow or get out of the way. The same may ultimately be said of delivery in our industry. It destroys the social experience, but the convenience seems to outweigh the loss in the mind of the consumer. Either way, our declining traffic coupled with huge growth in delivery might just be harbingers of a restaurant future few of us will embrace, but all of us with be affected by.
[Source: FSR Magazine]
WHAT’S YOUR STAGE?
Why it matters to you: No one should ever work for free.
There’s a dirty little secret in the world of fine dining (ok, maybe there are more than one) and it’s called staging. In French, the stage (pronounced staj) is an unpaid internship where a culinary aspirant works for free in the kitchen of an acclaimed restaurant. The morality aside of asking someone to work six days a week for no pay, the stage has been an integral part of developing fine dining professionals for generations. In fact, many chefs point to their own stage as making all the difference in the world to their careers. However, many others say it was exploitative, demeaning, and, in some cases, dangerous. So, we cab ignore the morality if we choose, but shouldn’t our industry be better than this?
If you are serious about learning the culinary trade and don’t want to take on the expense and time of a professional culinary school, then get a job in a fine dining restaurant. Learn what you can and then get another job at a different fine dining restaurant. Let’s be frank. Motivated and skilled people are hard to find, and that’s why no one should have to work for free to become a great chef. By not acquiescing to the pressure of working or free, your labors become even more valuable. Yes, you may learn from a chef that is happily exploiting your youth and desire to grow, but at a price that seems too high. You’re only as valuable as you perceive yourself to be, so don’t discount yourself -- or, to be sure, others will.
[Source: Eater]
